Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of UX issues it addresses, and extended its contribution into deeper levels of product-development decision making. This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the field’s continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design.

David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors
In Defense of Doing It
the Hard Way
Leanna Gingras

ITHAKA | [e-mail]

failed experiments, I am starting to think that these gimmicks and borrowed techniques from other fields amount to shortcuts, and shortcuts are not exactly formulas for success. Worse, I’m concerned that the quality of our work as a whole suffers: Every time we cut corners, we deliver subpar work that waters down the value that user research can offer.

We might not intend to skimp on our work, or we might feel pressured to cut corners in our quest to deliver more work more quickly, but no matter how you slice it, shortcuts aren’t actually doing us any favors. Shortcuts don’t help us produce good work, and if we strive to produce good work, shortcuts don’t actually save time. We have to do it the hard way.

 

March + April 2012

interactions

The job of a user-research professional is undoubtedly a hard one. Understanding problems, getting the right sample of people in our labs, extracting insights from data, and evangelizing the user’s needs can make for challenging work. At the same time, rewards abound in this profession: the joy of diving into a new topic, engrossing conversations with some of the hundreds of people who pass through my lab, and of course the aha moments—those glimmers of awesomeness alone more than make up for any difficulties. But every now and then I wish it were all a little...easier.

In the heat of the workweek, I’ve been tempted by quick fixes and shortcuts. A glance at the battlefield of user research tells me I’m not alone. It seems as if every week I read about some paradigm-shatter-ing new tool that promises to blow my mind, crunch all of my data by 5 o’clock, and have dinner on the table by 7. Tools like these are often pitched to us, an eager audience of open-minded, tired, bored, inexperienced, or budget-starved user-experience evaluators.

These promises are rarely fulfilled. I still end up spending hours hunched over my computer, or I don’t get the insights I was hoping for, or the quality of my work just plain suffers. After many

What Do Shortcuts and Cut Corners Look Like? Let’s get something out of the way first: When picking on shortcuts, I’m not targeting appropriate guerrilla user research. I have no issue with designers or one-man bands who just want to know how to improve their products. They don’t need to do it the hard way, and when they are ready to do it the hard way, they will approach their work differently, either by learning new skills or bringing in a seasoned researcher.

Rather, this discussion is intended for people whose primary focus is user research, day in and day out, whose job is to learn more about users and to understand their context. Solid user research requires both sweat and diligent work. Whether we are in the lab running usability studies or out in the field conducting ethnographic research, our core value as user-research professionals lies in our deep understanding of context, our analytical skills, and our ability to bring empiricism into the product-development process.

To put it another way, user-research professionals get hired not just because we are good at excavating truth, but also because we have a knack for mapping the knowns and unknowns around those truths, finding new points to investigate, and communicating the core truths that we learn in a way that’s helpful and productive. When we do that, we can help a design plow all the way to the other end of development, through shifting requirements and slippery scopes, without ever losing focus on the needs that the design was built to address.

It’s our job to ensure that rigor backs our process, and that we are actually being as precise in our measurements as we think we are.